MacroScope

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When U.S. President Barack Obama warns about the possible damage to economic growth from a failure to lift the debt ceiling, he usually speaks about it in the future tense. So does Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who, when asked about the issue in congressional testimony last week, said “it certainly could slow the economy.”

In his 1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man”, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously argued that all states were moving inexorably towards liberal democracy. His thesis that democracy is the pinnacle of political evolution has since been challenged by the violent eruption of radical Islam as well as the economic success of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia.

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Ever since Goldman Sach’s Jim O’Neill came up with the idea of BRICs as an investment universe, competitors have been indulging in a global game of acronyms. Why not add Korea to Brazil, Russia, India and China and get a proper BRICK? Or include South Africa, as it wants, to properly upper case the “s” – BRICS or BRICKS?

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The latest International Monetary Fund meeting ended with emerging market powers getting a pledge from the organisation for stronger and “more even-handed” scrutiny of what is going on in large advanced economies.

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Joschka Fischer was never one to mince words when he was Germany’s foreign minister in the late ’90s and early noughts. So it is not overly surprising that he has painted a picture in a new post of a world with only two powers — the United States and China — and an ineffective and divided Europe on the sidelines.

Thomson Reuters expert David Pendlebury might have an idea. At least one of the picks from his annual predictions of winners (economics, chemisty, and so on) has won a Nobel prize over the years. Here is his short-list for economics this year.

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The economic blogosphere has spoken — and it is not too happy with what it sees. The Kauffman Foundation has just published a survey of 68 economic (but not necessarily economist) bloggers showing that they are pretty gloomy about the U.S. economy’s progress.

from Jeremy Gaunt:

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It is beginning to look like financial markets cannot handle more than three risks. First we have, as MacroScope reported earlier, Barclays Wealth worrying about U.S. consumers, euro zone debt and Asian overheating.